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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   35215 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 26, 2023

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Why would he destroy the site just to prevent AI data scraping? This is like if KFC decided to only sell unseasoned chicken in order to keep Bojangles from stealing the 11 herbs and spices.

How many tokens are in Twitter? How many new ones are generated per day? What proportion are they of humanity's total output? What are they worth?

It's not much when naively calculated, but we're learning over the last few months that you get vastly more bang for buck out of high-quality datasets, to the extent that you can match models 1000x bigger and trained on 20x more data if you just get real good tokens. And in terms of both quality and especially recency, Twitter is unmatched, I believe. If you want a model that knows not only that there's a war going on in Ukraine but how it's going, you'll have to scrape Twitter.

That said I don't believe Musk knows or cares about that, seems like they just have problems paying the bill for their infra. Sounds insane I know.

Why don't you believe Musk knows or cares about that? There's extensive evidence that he's extremely AI pilled.

I haven't seen enough evidence or skepticism on display to fully buy into the Google Cloud claim (or any of the other just-desserts infrastructure stories), especially against the motivations and track records at play.

This seems to be the only source that ever reported anything about it:

Weekend scoop with @ZoeSchiffer for subscribers: Twitter is stiffing Google on its payments for Google Cloud, and significant parts of the company’s trust and safety infrastructure could collapse by the end of the month

I noticed some Musk replies in the ML/eacc/doomer sim cluster like 2 weeks ago, but this is still pretty esoteric stuff and he's presumably a busy man. In any case, I am not convinced these measures are effective at all.

If you're trying to determine how close he is to culture where that kind of thing in general is common knowledge: even ignoring the high-tier practitioners he employs and presumably has reasonably technical discussions with, I've been reading his /with_replies on and off for a year and am reasonably confident he's been lurking around the "ML/eacc/doomer sim cluster" since at least December and probably before.

If you're trying to determine whether he is aware of that research specifically, I don't think it matters enough to modulate his reasonably well-evidenced sense of considerable AI-training worth in Twitter's content.

And whether or not the measures are being perfectly effective this early on is orthogonal to any explanation for taking them, whether token-hoarding or infrastructure-comeuppance.

I can't see any mainstream social media site besides reddit being valuable for AI training data. Twitter isn't longform enough.

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